8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others who have become dependent upon pharmaceutical depression drugs, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

12 steps of recovery for other problems

These 12 steps have been adopted by numerous other recovery programmes - most of which simply changed the word "alcohol" in step 1, and "alcoholics" in step 12, to the problem they are recovering from.

The twelve steps are practiced world wide by millions of people recovering from a multitude of depression-related illnesses.